MrSeb writes: "After six years, significant investment by DARPA and IBM, and millions of man hours, researchers at IBM have created two silicon chips that are fundamentally brain-like in their operation. Built using IBM’s 45nm process, these chips are still constructed out of transistors, but they’re organized into a novel arrangement that mimics the neurons and synapses of animal brains. Both of the chips have 256 digital neurons that operate at 10MHz, and standard chip features like memory, communication controllers, and so on. One of the chips has 262,144 human-programmable synapses — but the other chip has 65,356 learning synapses, which are connected in a crossbar array for a total of almost 17 million different connections."